HOW TO TURN YOUR FROWN UPSIDE DOWN

For some reason, my mood, never the best in the early morning when I stumble blearily and resentfully from bed 10 minutes after smacking the snooze button again, ended up on a rapidly declining downward spiral that escalated as the day wore on. Don’t ask ME how that metaphor works, but it was true. My bad mood went from bad to worse and by the end of the day, as big fat raindrops began smacking the glass of my window while my back was turned, I was pretty sure that I had metamorphosed, sprouted a snout and fangs, a wiry bush of hair on the top of my head and claws from the tips of my fingers. I think my back was hunched (in fact, I know it was, because aiee my shoulders hurt now) and my glower was practically radioactive.

Why?

Gah, who knows? Just one of those damn days where everyone is stepping all over your last nerve and nothing seems to be going right and you feel fat and stupid and left out. And, hey by the way, is your Aunt Flo in town? NO, you snarl and rip someone’s head off, munch munch.

I drove home and stopped at the store to pick up milk and cucumbers and yogurt and clementines and bananas. Those clementines were the brightest thing I’d seen all day. Then I picked up the kids and took them home and we had dinner. Anders called in the middle of it and I nearly didn’t answer the phone because I was sure it was a telemarketer, since they seem to have a mealtime radar nowadays. But I did, and it was him, and it cheered me up marginally. And Karin and Martin were both chatty and cheery, telling me about their day and their English lessons and then making me name all the children in every class in their school photo catalog, which arrived today. I knew most of the kids’ names in their classes and most of the ones in the class inbetween since they had gone to daycare with the majority of them, but the rest of the kids were all “Nils? Anders? Sven? Johan? Axel? Nils? Nils? Nils!”

Then we counted how many children in their school have a parent who is not Swedish and it turned out that of 162 children, 18 of them have a foreign-born parent. Martin is the only Martin in the school. Karin is the only Karin.

And then the kids had ice cream and Karin went to play with a friend and Martin sat down on the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator to play with the magnetic letters that they have collected from the yogurt packs. So far, they have the following letters: A B D E L M N S. He started making words and soon the two of us were in a full-fledged live Boggle game, and he was coming up with words (in English, at my direction) quite speedily.

We ruled out including plurals since that was cheater-peatering. He came up with mesa though he didn’t know it was a word until I said so. I came up with blasé and one other that I will leave as an exercise to the reader to guess. He even came up with some names: Selma, Elma, Ned, Ben, Mabel, Sam, and Dan.

And during the whole thing we laughed our heads off. He cracked me up. I cracked him up. We cracked each other up. I feel SO MUCH BETTER NOW.